Related Items
  FREE Insurancenetworking.com Site Registration!
Sign up today and access the leading source of Insurance I.T. information on the Web.

Your FREE site registration entitles you to

FREE Insurance Networking eNewsletters

Search more than 7 years worth of archived data

White Papers and Industry Research that provide valuable insights on a variety of technologies and implementation issues

Access our Web Seminar series

   

News Briefs

March 2007

STRATEGIC GOALS GUIDE IT SPENDING

Senior insurance IT executives are making strategic investments, but budgets and staff size are generally flat or growing only modestly.

Those were among the findings reported by Boston-based Celent LLC in a study called "Insurance CIO/CTO Pressures, Priorities, Projects and Plans for 2007 Survey Results."

Matthew Josefowicz, manager of Celent's insurance group and author of the report sees continued focus on meeting demand for speed to market and ease of doing business, and on projects involving core systems, data mastery and distribution.

Areas of significant new project spending vary by size and sector, but include initiatives in underwriting, claims, product development and data mastery, the report says. Common areas of significant new product spending include document handling, policy administration system replacement, ACORD XML adoption, agent portals and BPM.

GLOBAL COMPANY TO TAKE UP SLACK IN CAT INSURANCE

Ironshore Inc. reports raising more than $1 billion through a private placement of equity securities to begin underwriting specialty lines of insurance through a Bermuda-based insurance subsidiary, Ironshore Insurance Ltd.

The new global insurance company was created in response to conditions in the U.S. property catastrophe insurance markets that resulted from harsh recent hurricane seasons that made coverage capital intensive and costly, Ironshore says.

RESEARCHER: GLBA HAS LITTLE EFFECT

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) has not created significant synergies between commercial banking, investment banking, merchant banking and insurance activities, according to a finance researcher at the University of Arkansas. The law also has had little effect on bank profitability and productivity.

"Banking stakeholders expected big changes from the GLBA," says Tim Yeager, an associate professor of finance at the Fayetteville, Ark.-based university and the Arkansas Bankers Association chair at the university's Sam M. Walton College of Business. "But despite these high expectations, gains from combining commercial banking and other financial services are small or had already been exploited."

He discovered that after the act's passage, many banks became financial holding companies in name but had not significantly expanded into the newly permissible activities.

They still derived most of their earnings from traditional banking activities, such as loan making and deposit taking.

Yeager found only minor synergies among commercial banking, insurance activities and merchant banking.

TECH PREPAREDNESS CAN HELP TAME REGULATORY ISSUES

Carriers need to step up their technology preparedness to get ready for industry-altering regulatory issues, according to new research from TowerGroup.

The issues-a proposed national catastrophe fund, a possible extension of the Terrorist Risk Insurance Act and an optional federal charter-made headlines but went unresolved in 2006.

Any of the three could profoundly change the IT function in the insurance business, according to a TowerGroup research note titled, "2007 US Insurance Regulatory Agenda: Déjà vu All Over Again," by Karen Pauli, a senior analyst in the Insurance Practice at the Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup consulting and research firm.

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:


Agent Network

Claims

Compliance

Customer Service

Data Management

Distribution

Enterprise Technologies

Insurance Network

Outsourcing

Policy Administration

Risk Management

Underwriting

Vendor Spotlights